As someone trained in analytical thinking, I would sometimes find information that didn’t fit into what I thought was true, that didn’t fit into the narrative I had been developing, given the data I had already collected. The temptation was to ignore it, to continue on the path I was on, and to just stay with the dominant theme I had discovered through my research.

But when I allowed myself to consider the information that didn’t agree, and why that was the case, my analysis always got deeper, better, and more interesting.

In the ideal analytical process, there should be three steps thesis (where you explore your ingoing assumptions), antithesis (where you consider the arguments against your hypothesis), and synthesis (where you incorporate the parts of the antithesis that make your original argument stronger). But we often skip the second and third steps, as the photo shows.

When we ignore the thoughts that don’t agree with our prior ideas, we lose the opportunity to take our understanding deeper and make our hypothesis stronger.

I learned from Susan Mehrtens, a psychologist and coauthor of the book Credible?, that Carl Jung called this idea paradoxical truth. Jung noted that paradoxical truth “holds the tension of opposites and thus fosters movement, growth and change.” This also struck a chord with me; we learned a similar concept in seminary: “both/and.”

Two ideas can both be true, even if they appear to contradict one another. We need to look for the way to integrate them. Because all humans are context-bound, we’re limited in what we believe is true. When we encounter an opposing viewpoint, it’s coming from a different context, one that has a grain of truth in it. Jung tells us that doing so leads to growth and change.

In her podcast “Happier”, the author Gretchen Rubin often mentions the idea of paradoxical truth. In her words, “the opposite of a truth is often also true”.

How can we apply this idea? Try to approach this discussion as if you were an anthropologist studying the culture. Look for the truths behind the ideas that don’t agree with your preexisting ideas. When we allow for the truth behind two conflicting ideas to emerge, it can lead us to a deeper truth. This is synthesis. Others call it paradox. In seminary, we called this thinking both/and. The idea is that there can be truth in two different ideas, and if that is true, then resolving the conflict can lead to important insights. Look for the glimpses of truth.

Also, think about the issues separately from the values and from the people. You need to decouple people themselves from what they believe and from the issues that arise out of their values. This set of posts I am writing about politics should help you separate them.